1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to fryer apparatus that use cooking media to cook product in a fryer, such as a pressure fryer or an open fryer, and that filter the cooking media while the cooking media remain in the fryer apparatus. The invention also is directed to methods for using such apparatus.
2. Description of Related Art
Known fryer apparatus are used to cook various food products, e.g., poultry, fish, potato products, and the like. Such fryer apparatus may include one or more cooking chambers, e.g., fryer pots, which may contain a cooking medium, e.g., an oil, a liquid shortening, or a meltable-solid or semi-solid shortening. Such fryer apparatus also include a heating element, i.e., an electrical heating element, such as a heating oil medium, or a gas heating element, such as a gas burner and gas conveying tubes, which heat the cooking medium in the cooking chamber. When preparing food in a fryer apparatus, the quality of the cooking medium, e.g., the oil or shortening, may impact the quality of the food that is cooked by the fryer apparatus. As the cooking medium is used to cook food, particles of food may contaminate the cooking medium. The flavor characteristics of each of these food products may become infused to a greater or a lesser degree in the cooking medium. This infusion may adversely affect food quality. Moreover, upon heating the cooking medium, the cooking medium may undergo chemical reactions, e.g., hydrolysis, oxidation, and polymerization.
These chemical reactions and flavor infusions may shorten the useful life of the cooking medium, and may result in more frequent replacement of cooking medium. As operators of fryer apparatus transition to using more expensive cooking media, i.e., zero-trans fat cooking media, frequently replacing an entire batch of cooking medium may become expensive. Thus, known fryer apparatus include filtering mechanisms to remove foreign objects, clumps, cracklings, and crumbs from the cooking medium, in order to preserve the useful life of the cooking medium. In known fryer apparatus, the cooking medium is drained from the cooking chamber into a filtration system, where the cooking medium is filtered. During this process, the fryer apparatus may not be used. Moreover, when the filtered cooking medium is returned to the cooking chamber, the cooking medium is reheated to a cooking temperature.
The longer the cooking medium is in the filtration system and out of the cooking chamber, the more time is required to reheat the cooking medium to an operating temperature. In a known filtration process, the time to reheat the cooking medium to an operational temperature may be greater than the time required to filter the cooking medium. Thus, draining the cooking medium from the filter may result in increased down time, i.e., time out of service for the fryer apparatus, which is not desirable, particularly in operations in which the fryer apparatus is expected to process a high volume of food products.
In addition, when filtering the cooking chamber, various foreign objects, e.g., food crumbs, clumps, and cracklings, may accumulate on the bottom of the chamber, and should be removed as part of the filtration process. Because these foreign elements may settle at the bottom of the chamber, they may not exit the cooking chamber with the cooking medium.
As mentioned above, in known fryer apparatus, filtration requires draining all or most of the cooking medium from the cooking chamber in order to perform filtration. In known fryer apparatus, this may be a time-consuming process, particularly when the filtration process also includes manually scrubbing the walls of the fryer apparatus by hand. Thus, when the fryer apparatus is used in a practical environment, filtration may not occur as often as is optimally desired, particularly when the fryer apparatus is used in a high-volume setting. Further, known fryer apparatus require the filtration process to be manually activated. Thus, during use in a practical environment, an operator may forget to perform filtration at the desired interval. This failure to perform filtration at optimal times may reduce the useable life of the cooking medium. Regardless of how often filtration is performed, however, the more filtration operations that are carried out, the longer each batch of cooking medium may maintain its usefulness. In known fryer apparatus, the useful life of the cooking medium is balanced against the utilization rate of the known fryer apparatus.